Ally founder and CEO Vetri Vellore.

A Seattle startup has raised $8 million to fuel its quest to help companies stay on track and hit their goals in an era of rapid change for businesses, markets and industries.

Founded two years ago, Ally say it’s seeing strong traction with its software platform. It’s used by customers such as Slack, Remitly, KPMG, and others to manage their Objectives and Key Results (OKR), a popular framework for running teams and businesses that became widely popular thanks in large part to its use at Google.

Accel led the Series A round, which included participation from Founders’ Co-op, Vulcan Capital, and Lee Fixel. Total funding to date is $11 million. The company has 25 employees across Seattle and India, with headcount expected to triple over the next year. It recently hired Shyft co-founder Chris Pitchford as vice president of sales and former Offerup and Microsoft vet Ganesh Sridharan as vice president of engineering.

Founder and CEO Vetri Vellore came up with the idea for Ally after an experience at his previous startup. In 2007 he co-founded Chronus, a company that built digital tools for employee development programs. He implemented OKRs but found it cumbersome to track progress with spreadsheets and other manual methods.

So Vellore built his own tool to streamline the process, which is what eventually led him to start Ally.

Ally says it has hundreds of customers using its service across 70 countries. Revenue is doubling quarter-over-quarter, according to the company, with interest from startups, large companies, nonprofits and government clients.

“We focus on reducing the friction of the [OKR] process while making it easy to follow a cadence,” Vellore said.

(Ally screenshot)

Ally integrates with other services such as Salesforce, Asana, Smartsheet and Slack, allowing its goal-setting software to work alongside a company’s daily workstream. Vellore said the tool is used across companies, not limited to senior leadership.

“We see more and more businesses focusing on increasing productivity by driving alignment, transparency, and visibility across the organization and Ally helps achieve that,” Abhinav Chaturvedi, partner at Accel, said in a statement.

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